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Living systems continuously transform matter and energy through the chemical processes that constitute their metabolism. The overall metabolic rate of an organism correlates positively with its body mass, however both the exact scaling…
We introduce a model called Host-Pathogen game for studying biological competitions. Notably, we focus on the invasive dynamics of external agents, like bacteria, within a host organism. The former are mapped to a population of defectors…
Medicine is moving from a curative discipline to a preventative discipline relying on personalised and precise treatment plans. The complex and multi level pathophysiological patterns of most diseases require a systemic medicine approach…
Microbial ecology serves as a foundation for a wide range of scientific and biomedical studies. Rapidly-evolving high-throughput sequencing technology enables the comprehensive search for microbial biomarkers using longitudinal experiments.…
We study the interplay of population growth and evolutionary dynamics using a stochastic model based on birth and death events. In contrast to the common assumption of an independent population size, evolution can be strongly affected by…
Digital food content could impact viewers' dietary health, with individuals with eating disorders being particularly sensitive to it. However, a comprehensive understanding of why and how these individuals interact with such content is…
Human beings are creatures of habit. In their daily life, people tend to repeatedly consume similar types of food items over several days and occasionally switch to consuming different types of items when the consumptions become overly…
Artificially evolving foraging behavior in simulated legged animals has proved to be a notoriously difficult task. Here, we co-evolve the morphology and controller for virtual organisms in a three-dimensional physically realistic…
Bacterial growth models are commonly used for the prediction of microbial safety and the shelf life of perishable foods. Growth is affected by several environmental factors such as temperature, acidity level and salt concentration. In this…
The human microbiome has an important role in determining health. Mediation analyses quantify the contribution of the microbiome in the causal path between exposure and disease; however, current mediation models cannot fully capture the…
Nutrient limitation is one of the most common triggers of antibiotic tolerance and persistence. Here, we present two microfluidic setups to study how spatial and temporal variation in nutrient availability lead to increased survival of…
The progress in artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms over the past decade has enabled the development of new methods for the objective measurement of eating, including both the measurement of eating episodes as well as…
Many motile microorganisms react to environmental light cues with a variety of motility responses guiding cells towards better conditions for survival and growth. The use of spatial light modulators could help to elucidate the mechanisms of…
Bacterial conglomerates such as biofilms and microcolonies are ubiquitous in nature and play an important role in industry and medicine. In contrast to well-mixed, diluted cultures routinely used in microbial research, bacteria in a…
A primary motivation for our research in digital ecosystems is the desire to exploit the self-organising properties of biological ecosystems. Ecosystems are thought to be robust, scalable architectures that can automatically solve complex,…
Microbiomes, which are collections of interacting microbes in an environment, often substantially impact the environmental patches or living hosts that they occupy. In microbiome models, it is important to consider both the local dynamics…
It is well known that dietary habits have a significant influence on health. While many studies have been conducted to understand this relationship, little is known about the relationship between eating environments and health. Yet…
Diagrammatic models of feeding choices reveal fundamental robotic behaviors. Successful choices are reinforced by positive feedback, while unsuccessful ones by negative feedback. This paper will address robotic feeding by casually relating…
Bacteria are easily characterizable model organisms with an impressively complicated set of capabilities. Among their capabilities is quorum sensing, a detailed cell-cell signaling system that may have a common origin with eukaryotic…
A fundamental challenge in microbial ecology is determining whether bacteria compete or cooperate in different environmental conditions. With recent advances in genome-scale metabolic models, we are now capable of simulating interactions…